It was a sad time a few years back when we lost an old friend in Calgary. He had spent a lifetime in the oil business and was a knowledgeable source on what was going on in the oil sands. I miss him for his friendship.
But life goes on and a retired professor gave me an insight recently into carbon capture that I would not have figured out for myself. It was that carbon captured from processing bitumen from the tar sands and pumped into played out oil wells can produce more crude oil from the oil wells.
It is based on the irregularity of the rock surfaces around the deposits of crude oil allowing for only 40 to 60 per cent of the oil to be brought to the surface. Given the price of crude oil today, compared to when those unclosed wells were producing wells, it sounds like a win-win to me. They don’t even need to re-open those wells that the governments have been trying to get them to close.
So why are the provincial and federal governments subsidizing this development?
This sounds like another oil boom for Alberta. Is that premier of questionable judgement to help spend the proceeds of this windfall for the Alberta government?
And it is all thanks to carbon capture and storage. What you find when you pump CO into old wells you release these additional pockets of crude oil and they can be pumped up from the wells. The results are supposed to be much better than the horizontal drilling that is producing more from today’s wells.
I would give you more on this but I am not comfortable with the figures I am seeing from the Alberta Energy Regulator. All I am seeing is continued growth in the Alberta oil business through to the 2030s. All I want to know is when we are going to have better non-polluting energy sources for our homes, autos and industries?
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